I’m a New Zealand-based Senior Sales Engineer for AppDynamics with more than 12 years of experience in the IT sector. I’ve had a lot of interesting work-related experiences over the years—living in Thai hospitals, traveling by armed convoy to remote gold mining sites, and even getting down and dirty with calculating the yield of offal and tallow within the primary industries. And while the organizations I’ve worked with spanned a variety of industries, each shared a common objective: the need for service assurance.
The idea of assurance came to me from an AppDynamics customer, whose company was trying to move all of its IT expenditures from CapEx to OpEx, which meant a major shift to managed services. The company had a few key partnerships it relied upon heavily, partners that provided Level 1 support, infrastructure and, in some cases, both application-level support and applications-as-a-service (SaaS).
Rather than buy an application performance monitoring solution directly from an APM provider like AppDynamics, the company wanted to consume APM as a service from another vendor such as a service provider. Why take this approach? The customer—as is often the case with many organizations—was looking for service assurance that an MSP could provide. A laudable goal, certainly, but one with considerable risk as well.
Retaining Visibility
When an organization outsources numerous managed services, it starts to lose visibility into its operation. It grows unsure of what’s going on behind the scenes. And while this organization may be very happy with the managed services it’s receiving, it has no visibility into what’s coming down the line. If, for instance, it’s 10 minutes away from a critical failure, it may not be able to see the event coming. In short, it lacks visibility into its own operations.
In this scenario, the company becomes uncomfortably reliant on its partners, who may not be willing to readily accept blame for a problem, largely because the admission of fault may reflect badly upon them and trigger contractual obligations. And if the company uses multiple MSPs, the situation will be worse, with each MSP pointing the finger away from themselves and saying, “It’s that guy’s fault.”
How APM Can Help
By providing advanced visibility into an application, APM enables the end customer to quickly find the fault, work with the appropriate MSP, and not waste support hours diagnosing a problem with the wrong vendors.
APM offers comfort—or assurity—that the end customer can very quickly identify the area at fault, thereby reducing its mean time to identify (MTTI). And because the customer is working with a single APM provider, it can reduce its mean time to recovery (MTTR) as well.
MSPs benefit, too. Providing service providers with access and visibility into faults can help with reductions in MTTR. And when multiple vendors are involved, the single-pane-of-glass view provided by an APM dashboard can be utilised by all parties for diagnosis and repair.
Keeping Them ‘Honest’
As an end customer, what level of assurance do you have that your MSP is operating as expected? And how do you know if an application, which you invested heavily in, is behaving properly? If your MSP is only telling you that the app is “available,” that’s not good enough.
It’s not always easy to determine whether an application is performing well, though, and which metrics best gauge its overall business impact. In addition to technical metrics, you’ll also need to identify the business transactions (BTs) that are most valuable to you, and whether they’re delivering their expected value.
You should encourage your MSP to have a service-level agreement (SLA) that covers not only technical metrics and BTs, but also valuable business metrics such as sales conversion, digital service adoption, and so on.
APM delivers these insights by providing real-time visibility into the performance of your business. Instead of relying on daily or monthly business intelligence reports to see if you’re meeting your SLAs from a technical and business standpoint, you get this information in real time.
In addition to helping you get the best return from your MSP, these insights enable you to make informed, moment-by-moment decisions, such as driving users to a particular channel as part of a digital transformation, i.e. steering customers away from an overloaded call center and toward online support.
The MSP also benefits from APM, which becomes a value-added service they can offer customers, one providing complete transparency and forging a true strategic partnership with customers.
A True Strategic Partnership
Outsourcing has its advantages but can also lead a loss of control, creating risk for organizations and individuals alike. Service assurance provides a level of comfort, giving an organization control and insight into the performance of its application, as well as confidence that its MSP is providing value.
From the perspective of the MSP, this also demonstrates a willingness and openness for a true strategic partnership with its customer. This strong and trusted partnership is critical to ensure success for the customer, the MSP and, most importantly, service for the end user.
CGI, a leading IT and business process services firm, had a major infrastructure contract that required end-to-end service delivery, but the nature of the environment made this difficult to achieve. To comply with its SLA, CGI needed an efficient way to measure business transactions end-to-end. CGI integrated AppDynamics into its existing platform and immediately began getting insights into system performance, enabling it to demonstrate SLA compliance, get complete end-to-end visibility of business transactions, and build a more robust process between its development, testing and production environments.
Schedule a demo to learn how AppDynamics can help assure your own service success!
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